The aim of this paper is to analyze the institute of the child's special guardian in Croatian law and to assess its compliance with relevant international and European standards in this legal area. The paper discusses the right of the child to be heard "through a representative" under Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, European "childfriendly" legal representation standards and relevant cases in the latest case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The institute of special guardian in Croatian legislation and legal practice is analyzed in detail. Based on the analysis of data collected from the Special Guardianship Center and on the insight into relevant case law, the paper singles out the main problems that currently exist regarding child representation by special guardians in practice and identifies their causes, but also suggests what needs to be done to improve the application of relevant regulations in legal practice.
Contemporary developments in European procedural law reveal a growing interest in the protection and promotion of children's (procedural) rights. The right of the child to be heard in proceedings resulting in decisions which directly or indirectly affect its rights and interests, is a procedural right of the child, granted by numerous European documents. One of such proceedings is certainly divorce proceedings involving children. This paper is aimed at demonstrating and analysing the ways in which the right of the child to be heard is protected in European law as well as at examining whether the protection of the right of the child to be heard in divorce proceedings in Croatian law is harmonized with the standards of European law in this legal area. Considering that the latest reform of Croatian family legislation (2015) has proposed some new solutions relating to the expression of child's views in divorce proceedings, the author has conducted empirical research to examine the experiences of application of those solutions in legal practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.